If you run an ecommerce store, you’d sooner drive blindfolded than run your site without Google Analytics. Knowing your traffic and conversion rates is the first step to improving them.

Similarly, every ecommerce brand understands the value of user reviews. Online shopping is accessible, but needs social proof to convince customers to take a chance with a new brand.

Getting positive customer reviews is important enough that brands often send free samples in exchange for initial reviews on a new product.

Analytics are essential. Reviews are essential. You’d think that review analytics would follow – measuring which reviews drive sales and highlighting the top performers – but most brands overlook it.

Larger stores hire CRO consultants to watch screen recordings and heatmaps to see which reviews customers linger over before buying. It’s an expensive, laborious process, but yields valuable insights into what content to feature in testimonials and ads.

Even then, it’s largely a gut-feeling process. Compare that to the rigor that goes into analyzing paid ad performance – software measures every impression, click, hover, and conversion to squeeze every ounce of ROI out of ad campaigns.

That’s why Birb’s so excited to apply ad-tech quality analytics and optimization to ecommerce reviews. For a brand with dozens (or hundreds!) of product reviews, often their best reviews get buried pages deep where prospective customers will never see it. Birb tests all reviews to find the hidden gems.

For the first time, we’re able to show brands which reviews are influencing purchase decisions, just like how multi-touch ad attribution lets brands know which of their ads are driving sales.

Galileo, inventor of the telescope, said, “Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.”

Right now all that customer interaction data is being lost, when it could be used to improve store performance, inform product development, and streamline ad creation.

Birb won’t discover new moons around Jupiter, but it does give ecommerce stores their first glimpse into the secret lives of  how their customers interact with reviews – and automatically discover and highlight their best content to convert more sales.